Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2514
“I am among you as He that serves.” Luke 22:27.
OBSERVE, dear Friends, that our Lord, in order to impress a great practical Truth of God upon His 12 Apostles, refers them to Himself. He very often does so, quoting His own doings as an example to His servants. Does not this fact give us a hint that there is someone greater than a man here, for no mere man, modest and true and right-minded, would continually make himself the object of imitation! We would not consider it right if we found Abraham, or Moses, or David constantly pointing to himself as an example. Such a course is very proper for certain persons in certain special cases as, for instance, Paul might occasionally allude to himself when he was addressing his own converts, but even then rarely doing it—and doing it with extreme diffidence. But our Lord acts thus very often and with the utmost possible naturalness! Neither did it ever suggest itself to anyone of His people that there was anything immodest in His doing so. Such an idea never occurred to us because we have always recognized in Him something which entitled Him to speak thus, something which rendered it quite right that He should so speak. He is Master and Lord! He is very God of very God! He is perfect! He is out of the lists of ordinary men, He rises like a lone Alp above us all and when He speaks as He does in the words before us, the very fact that He does speak without our feeling any objection thereto proves that there is a something altogether unique about His Character, and that something, I believe, is the existence of perfection, and the evidence of Deity combined with His Humanity.
I want, therefore, to say to you who are Christ’s people—As He has saved you, follow Him! If you are washed in His blood, be like He! If, indeed, He is your Master and Lord, obey Him! In all that you do, ask yourselves this question, “What would Christ have done under these circumstances?” And then act according to the answer which God’s Word and your own conscience give you. “As He is, so are we, also, in this world.” And if we fulfill our destiny to the glory of God and the honor of our Redeemer, we shall make men see in our own proper persons what Christ was when He was here—“holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners.” Christ always points us to Himself. If He bids us trust Him,
He also bids us follow Him. If He bids us hope in Him, He also bids us obey Him and be like He is. And they who will not have His holiness shall not have His Atonement! If we do not care to be like He is, we cannot be saved by Him.
The particular evil at which our Lord aimed when He uttered the words of our text was the evil which is so common in the Church, even down to the present day, that is, each man seeking to be somebody. We are all born greatthe first time—it is only when we are born the second time, born from above—that we come to be little. When we were born the first time, we were so great that we were really nothing—but when we are born a second time, we are so little that we are everything in Christ! At first, self seeks to gain the mastery. It has a head that must wear the crown and feet that must be shod with silver slippers. Self will wear no sackcloth, it must be clad in silk at the very least. Self always exalts itself above all its fellows—it even pines after the Throne of God, for self has the ambition of Lucifer and will never be satisfied, however high it mounts. Now, our Savior wants, in His disciples, that self should be crushed, that all desire to be great should be quenched and that, instead of all of us wanting to be masters, we should see which of us can be servants! If we are as Christ was, we shall catch the spirit which made Him say, “I am among you as He that serves.”
I. To that point I bend all my strength just now and, first, I want to speak a little upon our Lord’s position among His own followers—“I am among you as He that serves.”
The 12 Apostles came together to the Last Supper. There was usually a servant or slave in the room to wash the feet of the guests, but there does not appear to have been such a person on that occasion. Peter did not offer. Even John did not think of it. Thomas was probably considering who ought to do it and Philip, the arithmetician of the Apostles, was calculating how much water it might take—but nobody offered to do it. Everybody’s business, you know, is nobody’s business, so nobody offered to wash anybody’s feet. They had already taken their positions, reclining about the table when, without any suggestion from anybody else, the Master Himself rose from their midst, laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself with it, poured water into a basin and went from one to another—and washed their feet. After He had done that, and was again reclining with them, He said to them, in effect, “I am among you as the slave, the domestic who does the most menial work. You see that I am.” They could not contradict it, for He had actually and literally taken that position among them.